Planning Board okays new drugstore – with conditions

More than three hours into their fourth public airing of plans to construct a new CVS drugstore and Chase bank branch at the corner of Park Street and Tilden Way, members of Alameda’s Planning Board appeared prepared to bend to what one member called pragmatism in their efforts to shape the development plans. City staffers had worked to negotiate a host of changes to the plans, including the inclusion of clear windows along Park instead of opaque ones, and the board opted to meet the drugstore chain halfway.

Andrew Thomas, the city’s top planner, said the board’s approval of the project – which came, with more than 80 conditions, shortly after 11 p.m. Monday – would fill in “one of the prime sites” along a stretch of Park Street between Lincoln Avenue and the Park Street Bridge that auto dealerships which once served as a major tax generator for the Island had abandoned over the last several years. But the new development – as new developments often do – raised a host of concerns, too, chiefly among the residents who will live alongside it.

With the auto dealerships gone, Island residents and city planners were given some fresh canvas on which to draw plans for an extension of Park Street’s prized assemblage of restaurants and shops – and the replacement of at least some of the tax revenue that vanished with the dealerships. But residents of the Wedge neighborhood that abuts the shopping district also see an opportunity, to change what for many has been an uneasy coexistence with their commercial neighbors.

“This is a residential neighborhood, and we’d like that to be considered,” Wedge resident Nanette Burdick told the Planning Board on Monday night.